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  • THURSDAY FEBRUARY 26 2009 6:00 AM

Termi-nation: A 25th Anniversary Look Back at The Terminator

Submitted by Michael_Marano

Edited by nicole_powers

Tags: The Terminator, Ronald Reagan, Cold War, Nukes, Armageddon, Other Scary Shit



I divide my time between two towns that I call home, Boston, MA and Charleston, SC. Both towns are near military bases and both, back in the big-haired, leg-warmer-wearing 1980s, sweated in the nuclear crosshairs of the Cold War -- so much so, that Charleston got nuked in a really good and really controversial 1983 made-for-TV flick called Special Bulletin.

In Boston, I sometimes go to this thing called "Heroes" -- a retro 1980s dance night. And in Charleston, I hang out at this karaoke-like scene called "Metal Monday", where you get to belt out '80s crunch rock classics with a live band.

Thing is, to me, a guy who was 20-years old in that most Orwellian of years, 1984, the dance floor of "Heroes" is only akin to the real '80s in the way that the Renaissance Faire is akin to rural France in 1358, during the Jacquerie uprising. Kinda fun -- but without the Armageddon-y goodness of famine, class warfare and plague. You could say there's a lil' somethin' missing. And much as I love "Metal Monday", I can't help but brainwork how "karaoke" is Japanese for "empty orchestra", and how without a particular bouquet-whiff of immanent doom, "Metal Monday" is discount-chocolate-Easter-Bunny hollow.

We're living in a cultural landscape thicketed with old-growth 1980s, as stubbornly rooted in our minds as the Proustian olfactory memories of the scents of belched up wine coolers, Duran Duran-esque hair mousse, and He-Man and She-Ra Shrinky Dinks contracting in the oven. Beyond things like "Heroes" and "Metal Monday", and the fact that a Flock of Fucking Seagulls now get played on "Classic Rock" stations, there's a litany of other examples I can list: washed-up '80s icon Mickey Rourke's defibrillation back to the living as a washed-up '80s icon in The Wrestler; millions of fanboys dampening their shorts with pre-ejaculate for Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen; new iterations of '80s slasherdom in the form of "re-imaginings" of VHS-era standbys My Bloody Valentine and Friday the 13th (yeah, Friday the 13th was made in '79, but as a franchise, it's pure '80s); G.I. Joe: the Rise of Cobra rating a Super Bowl spot for its August release; the looming advent of the alternate reality, atomic panic, superhero '80s epic Watchmen...and, God help the crushed scrotum of our creativity, Beverly Hills Cop IV is in the works.

And the return of one of the most iconic '80s artifacts is about the rain down like fallout. This summer brings Terminator: Salvation, a humongous movie that, due to the twisty knots of time travel, will be a prequel, a sequel, and a reboot of the franchise, and the first flick in a new trilogy starring everyone's fave f-bomb-dropping Welsh wigout master, Christian Bale.

The return of the Terminator gives me comfort in this omigod-fucking-drive-a-stake-through-its-heart-already 1980s resurrection. The Terminator, was a true icon, before it was ripped off by everything from V: The Series to Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah to Wallace and Gromit In A Close Shave to the porn flick The Sperminator. And of course there were those disturbingly fascist animated man/machine hybrids that used to show up during the bumper segments of televised NFL games.

The metal endo-skeletoned man/machine was the embodiment of a specific vintage of berserk, apocalyptic terror that defined the years of the Reagan/Bush Junta. The 1980s, which saw the final frenzy of the Cold War, was a time of doom in which even a benign kiddie movie like The Monster Squad (which gifted us with the knowledge that, indeed, "Wolfman's got nards!") featured the special effects-y end of the world. Doomsday loomed, and the coke-driven, junk-bond-funded bacchanal of doomsday was the cultural engine behind what is now reduced to the '80s kitsch of "Heroes" and "Metal Monday".

James Cameron's 1984 film, The Terminator, is now 25 years old. In turn, it was constructed atop the legacy of films from a quarter century before: 1959's Hiroshima Mon Amour, On the Beach, and the Geiger-clicking radioactive brontosaurus of The Giant Behemoth.

The Terminator is now recognized as a historical artifact. The Library of Congress recently placed it in the National Film Registry, for its being not just "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant, but also a work of "enduring significance to American culture."

Amen to that.

The Terminator is a work of cultural, historic, and aesthetic significance. But more than that, it's an important artifact of a once ubiquitous psychological reality, especially for geezers like me who thought that our beloved, doddering, Teflon-coated Unca Ronnie was gonna get us vaporized.

The inevitability of Apocalypse was a psychological ache that knotted our thoughts into rosaries of angst. In 1983, a girl I knew in my home town of Buffalo, NY lived near a neighborhood that was leveled by a propane explosion. She screamed and panicked when the blast knocked her out of bed because she was sure bombs were dropping. I talked to a bartender who was painting houses one summer near a naval base in Connecticut. The base blared an air raid test without notifying the surrounding community, whereupon this guy, thinking the nukes were flying, looked at the guy on the ladder next to his. They both shrugged and kept on painting, not knowing what else to do, sure that the shadows of their own vaporized forms would soon be on the wall they painted. My high school girlfriend asked me to kill her if the bombs dropped and we were left alive -- melodramatic, I know, but it was...y'know...high school.

No matter what melodramatic form my girlfriend's panic took, this terror was a sane response to a world gone bugshit. Unca Ronnie, early in his Presidency, John Hancock'ed a little goodie called the National Security Decision Document, which shifted the paradigm of nuclear war to something that the US could and should win, rather than it's more pedestrian and sane conception as a "non-survivable event." (*1) Reagan and his boys were talking such crazy cowflop that, if anybody else had said it in public, they'd be shot full of Thorazine and strapped to a gurney with rubber blankets. And these were the guys with their fingers on the button!

How can any sane person deal with a president making the famous joke that Unca Ronnie let fly on August 11, 1984, in front of an open mic, "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes," a Dorothy Parker-ish bon mot that put the Soviets on alert?

In 1982, while culturally America was creaming itself over the adorableness of the Christ-like ET, Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberg was talking to Harvard students about the Apocalypse that might bring Christ back to earth. According to the New York Times (*2):

[A] student asked Mr. Weinberger: 'Do you believe the world is going to end, and, if you do, do you think it will be by an act of God or an act of man?'

'I have read the Book of Revelation,' the Secretary replied, 'and, yes, I believe the world is going to end -- by an act of God, I hope -- but every day I think that time is running out.'



In the fall of 1981, Secretary of State Alexander Haig said it'd be just a spiffy idea, if things got hot in Europe, to fire a nuclear warning shot at the Soviets if they used conventional forces, as if Ivan would just pack up his toys and shuffle back to Trotskygrad in the face of America's throbbing, uncircumcised atomic dick. But you know, even nuclear warning shots aren't that dire a commitment, as, according to Unca Ronnie, once you launched those nukes, you can recall them, just the way a falconer recalls his noble bird back to his gauntlet. In May of 1982, old "Dutch" said:

Those [nukes] that are carried in bombers, those that are carried in ships of one kind or another, or submersibles, you are dealing there with a conventional type of weapon or instrument, and those instruments can be intercepted. They can be recalled if there has been a miscalculation.



These terrors that bubbled in our collective Id attained a kind of Ground Zero in the few days before the release of The Terminator on October 26, 1984, when Reagan was running against Walter Mondale. Reagan was talking craziness about the 'end of the world' that so freaked out a bunch of Catholic, Jewish and Evangelical leaders, that on October 24, they were compelled to sign a document condemning Reagan's use of "nuclear Armageddon" rhetoric as being a "perversion of Holy Scripture and a danger to the security of our Republic." (*3) For their pains, they were heckled at their press conference by a phalanx of smegma brains from the Moral Majority, lead by the Heritage Foundation's Paul Weyrich.

A few days before that, in San Francisco, Mondale called out Unca Ronnie on the insanity of his "you can the recall the nukes" comment, saying (*4):

Think about that for a minute....You fire missiles, they come out of the submarine hole, go through the water, go into the air for several thousand miles and then you decided not to fire them. So they're stopped. Like a movie rolling backward, the missile backs up, goes down through the water and back into the submarine hole.



And just two days before The Terminator hit screens with its premise of uncontrollable mechanized warfare destroying humanity, a bunch of liberal malcontents chanted, "You can't call them back! You can't call them back!" (*5) at a Reagan campaign stop in Columbus, Ohio.

Beyond the psychological and political context in which it was released, The Terminator is an important document in that it makes visible what the Reaganite ideology wanted to keep invisible (and there is a fucked up terror to being forced into invisibility). Maybe just the way European exiles, as outsiders to American culture, could come to the U.S. and create a uniquely American genre about uniquely American outsiders in the form of film noir, it took a Canadian guy like James Cameron to fill The Terminator with the urban diaspora who lived in exile in their own country under Reagan.

The movie gives a glimpse into the urban shitscape that was city living in the 1980s, when, as a punk kid walking home to my shitty apartment, I'd have to pick the glass from broken crack vials the from treads of my Army Surplus combat boots.

Early in the flick, our hero Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), naked after dropping through time from a future dystopia to Unca Ronnie's trash-choked dystopia, steals clothes from one of the homeless that Reagan had cattle prodded into the streets, and for whom Reagan would abdicate any moral responsibility by saying they were homeless by choice.

The movie's cheapness is a virtue, as the location filming, on streets too dirty to be sets, preserves and documents the grime of the era nicely, as does the gloom of the discount store where Reese steals shoes and a coat before going back out into the night where guys who were themselves thrown out like trash push shopping carts to scavenge trash.

Reagan hated cities, populating them in his rhetoric with "welfare queens" as far back as 1976 while speaking in small towns. But even while he slammed cities, as far back as 1974, he presented a neo-platonic ideal of the city as a fucked up kind of political reality, the "Shining City on a Hill." This Puritan jerk-off fantasy seemed to exist as a thing Reagan created specifically so that his suburbanite voting bloc could hate real cities for not living up to that fantasy.

The Terminator, even as a science fiction movie, is a portrait, albeit a stylized one, of the neglected human detritus who could never be part of that City on a Hill. The first person seen in the movie is an African American garbage man working the night shift. Our heroine, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), is a waitress...the very kind of working young person whose nickel-and-dime tips Reagan would tax two years later while Santa Claus-ing tax cuts for the rich in an effort to facilitate trickle down oppression. The secondary characters, from Dick Miller as the gun store owner who gets blown away to the janitor who gets the first computer-generated "Fuck you, asshole!" in the history of cinema, to Paul Winfield as a cop, are too real as city people...they don't belong in Reagan's fairy tale city. They belong in the metropolises Reagan strangled.

The Terminator himself (Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, now the administrator of the eighth largest economy in the world), before he went all candy-ass-"Now-I-know-why-you-cry" in the second flick, brought a small-scale version of Reagan's atomic Book of Revelations/fever vision into the kind of real city that would get blown to shit in the event of a real nuclear war. The iconography of atomic war is the destruction of cities -- from Godzilla to The Day After to the Oscar-winning The War Game to the later Terminator sequels. Fighting the Terminator was akin to fighting for our cities; it was invisible people fighting for the invisible people Reagan forsook.

So, with the prospect of not just a new Terminator sequel coming down the pike, but a new mini-franchise, the question arises, will the 2009 model Terminator bring us a new kind of terror suitable for today, in a world still defined by eight years of Neocon non-reality-based worldview, and thus be a document of our time? Or will it just be a karaoke of the social, political, and psychological forces that a young Canuck named Cameron scab-picked apart a quarter of a century ago? A simulacrum of something dynamic and alive, the way the Terminator himself was a simulacrum of something that lived?

Then again, maybe like "Heroes" and "Metal Monday", it could just be fun.


Notes


    *1. Further reading: Robert Scheer's book With Enough Shovels: Reagan Bush & Nuclear War, (1983).
    *2. Briefing by Phil Gailey & Warren Weaver Jr., The New York Times (Late Edition / East Coast), August 23rd, 1982. Page A-14.
    *3. Armageddon View Prompts a Debate by John Herbers, The New York Times, October 24th, 1984. Page A-1.
    *4. Mondale Questions Reagan's Ability To Understand Nuclear Arms by Gerald M. Boyd & Jane Perlez, The New York Times, October 16th, 1984. Page A-24.
    *5. Reagan At Ohio Rally, Attacks Mondale Anew by Francis X. Clines, The New York Times, October 25th, 1984. Page B-19.
    *6. There is no six.




© Michael Marano 2009.

Horror writer, pop culture commentator and Public Radio film critic Michael Marano previously wrote "Ten Lessons Spider-Man Can Teach Our First Nerd President", and has a new fiction collection in the works about the crazy shit he lived through in the 1980s entitled Stories from the Plague Years.

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ZenTrixter

ZenTrixter

Portland, OR
October 2002

FEB 26, 2009 11:17 AM

A few things:

You could have said the same thing and gotten to the same point with about five-hundred less words.

As far as the whole Reagan -vs- Mondale "recalling the nukes" thing: This has been a long-standing beating on Reagan for a (admittedly) poorly worded attempt to illustrate military asset deployment and management. Reagan was not referring to launched ICBM's. He was referring specifically to SAC-based bomber-delivered and USN-delivered nuclear weapons, often referred to as "first-strike" assets. In the command-and-control parlance of the day, they were often referred to as "weapons" in their own right, which, when left unexplained or without context, could indeed be extrapolated outward to also include ICBM-delivered warheads. Reagan was, if nothing else, the king of "without context". He'd meant that those first-strike assets could be mobilized, in a visible way to the Soviets, with their mere activation being a warning shot across Moscow's bow, but could just as quickly be deactivated or recalled in-flight and essentially disappear back into near-invisibility (in the case of SAC and SSBN assets). This concept was the backbone of the trifurcated nuclear military strategy of the 70's and 80's, often referred to as the "nuclear triad" model of nuclear deterrence. Doesn't mean it was a smart, logical or even sane model (it was, of course, none of those things), but to infer that Reagan was so dull as to mean that he could get Minuteman missiles to suck their smoke-trails back up their bottom-ends and nestle themselves neatly back in their silos in full-reverse fashion after launch is just as absurd as the actual plausibility of the concept itself. Reagan was simply guilty of leaving a concept half-explained. Mondale's camp seized upon that and ran with it. It helped them oh so much, as Mondale's lack of presidential tenure illustrates. Ronnie may have been many things, but a rube actually wasn't one of them. Trust me; I'm no fan of The Gip, but as a historian and a realist, I like to look at the truth of things, and to lay that out without any real context isn't all that helpful.

And finally, a tiny anaorak-y nitpick:

in the way that the Renaissance Faire is akin to rural France in 1358, during the Jacquerie uprising


First off, I don't really know of any renfaire worth attending that would be illustrating rural France in 1358, so the Renaissance Faire analogy is just wonky. Firstly, the period of time you're referring to is actually the Late Middle Ages. The Renaissance--while beginning in Italy in the 14th CE--really wasn't hopping in France in the 1300's (they were rather busy with the Black Death and all that). The French Renaissance traditionally extends roughly from the French invasion of Italy in 1494 [Charles VIII] through and up to the death of Henry IV in 1610). The short of it is, you got the year of the Jacquerie uprising right, but that's about it.

but without the Armageddon-y goodness of famine, class warfare and plague


Actually, there were plenty of all three then in Northern France during the Jacquerie uprising. There was an active famine going on (French famine: 1358–1360), a nice class struggle against both the aristocracy as well as the nobility (it was a peasant uprising, after all) and plenty of plague to go 'round. Short-form: you probably want to refrain from using historical references in your writing--especially to illustrate a point--unless you're actually familiar with them, or assholes like me will correct you.

Over-all, I wish you'd have taken some of your words and directed them at the impact the Terminator movie had on public consciousness in both a cultural and socio-political way instead of wasting them trying to sound oh-so learned and clever. That would have been rather interesting and very worth-while. We have a president now who grew up in that era (in the shadow of the mushroom cloud, like all of us 40-somethings) and had just graduated from undergraduate studies when the film was released. How formative was this kind of "entertainment" statement in the development of political and social consciousness to someone like him? This film was aimed squarely at his generation, yet you make no mention of it. I wish you would have...

Tallboy66

Tallboy66

Chicago, IL
January 2005

FEB 26, 2009 11:38 AM

Whoa. Good to know that the world is still ending 25 years later.

I always liked the glass on the street now it was more from 40 oz'ers and broken car windows than crack in my old 'hood but it looked so sparkly in the sun and since you're always looking down as to avoid eye contact you can only look at you own shoes so long.

God bless Reagan and his dementia he should have been a visual artist instead of president. surreal

CheshireCat

CheshireCat

Los Angeles, CA
January 2004

FEB 26, 2009 01:13 PM

I cannot bear to watch the Terminator series , I just hate it , for some reason it does not work for me. I also feel the multiple sequels have ruined the quality of the original. Like most great 80s movies , it was the low budget look which made it look so great. I am happy about the 80s culture being back , as well as the 90s creeping back with Janes Addiction and NIN touring together this summer. Ah well I suppose I can complain about the new Terminator movie on someone else thread later, hmmm hopefully it will be good , and if not we have Tron 2 and a new revamped V series t look forward to. I suppose it is inevitable that there will possibly be an Air Wolf movie as well coming about , but wasn't that sort of a television show based on the popularity of a great 80s movie Blue Thunder?
P.s. you really should have credited " La Jetee " by Chris Marker as the bones of which "Terminator " was created on , it was a huge inspiration to James Cameron as well as for several other sci - fi films including ' 12 Monkeys."

ZenTrixter

ZenTrixter

Portland, OR
October 2002

FEB 26, 2009 01:20 PM

CheshireCat said:
P.s. you really should have credited " La Jetee " by Chris Marker as the bones of which "Terminator " was created on , it was a huge inspiration to James Cameron as well as for several other sci - fi films including ' 12 Monkeys."


Well-made point, CC...

Michael_Marano

Michael_Marano

Somerville, MA
January 2009

FEB 26, 2009 03:40 PM

Hey, Zen Trixter--

Just some quick Bullet Points in reply:

*500 words fewer? Dude! Did you count the words in your comment! Maybe we both should enter a logorrhea treatment program, no? wink

*You make an interesting point about Reagan and the nukes, and I concede I might not have presented a complete context for what Reagan meant (and, having read Lou Cannon's great biographies of Reagan, I know that fathoming Reagan a lot of times is a matter of peeling the metaphoric onion, layer by layer). But I maintain that what Reagan was perceived to have meant, that the rhetoric of the time in the debates and dialogues with Mondale, were very much part of the paranoia and zeitgeist of the time The Terminator came out, regardless. The newspaper reports I quote bear that out.

*As for the Ren Faire and France, 1358... you totally mis-read what I wrote, Bro! I'm making the point that Heroes is a re-creation of an abstract idea of the 1980s in the way certain Ren Faires are re-creations of an abstract idea of the late Middle Ages; both lack the authenticity of the anxieties of the times they nominally re-create (and as for your points on historiography, I've seen things re-created at Ren Faires that range from the 13th to the 16th centuries).

*Criticizing an essay for what it isn't is pretty lame. Sorry, man. It just is. Criticizing it for what it fails to do is fine. What you suggest would be a fine essay, I agree. But it ain't the one I wrote. As for what Obama thought of The Terminator, I haven't found any mention he's made of it, unlike other geeky things like Star Trek, Spider-Man, Superman, etc.

Michael_Marano

Michael_Marano

Somerville, MA
January 2009

FEB 26, 2009 03:41 PM

Hey, CC!
Just want to thank you for your shout out about Chris Marker's La Jette. It's a great movie, and worth mentioning. I didn't want to bring up that, and the other antecedents of The Terminator, like Harlan Ellison's Outer Limits scripts "Soldier", "Demon with the Glass Hand" and his story "I Have No Mouth, and I must Scream" and Fritz Leiber's "Change War" stories, as I thought it might just be a little too much info and make the essay lose its focus. So, yeah... track down these Terminator antecedents if you can, as they're all really freakin' good.

Odradek

Odradek

Buffalo, NY
September 2007

FEB 26, 2009 08:42 PM

Fantastic article. Nice to see someone writing intelligently about the nostalgia for the 1980s. Forget those whining about length -- I'd personally like to see you offer more contributions to SG and raise the level of cultural analysis up a few notches.

foxbat

foxbat

Charlottesville, VA
June 2008

FEB 26, 2009 09:17 PM

Michael,

As one who grew up occasionally checking the DEFCON thermometer in the 1980's I was intrigued by the subject matter of your essay. It is was it is thus I agree when you said there is no point aiming criticism at that level. Yet I feel as if I was caught by a very polished movie teaser and ended up leaving let down like so many sequels you pointed out. I felt it lacked some needed coherence. At times it seemed more like you were using rather rich subject matter that had already captured the full attention of nearly all of us Gen-Xers as a pulpit from which to take aim at Uncle Ronnie in places John Hinckley missed. I do not think that was your goal I just had hoped I'd find it more pointed and entertaining. I think Zen-Trixter 'nuked' most of the technical and historical errata I might have responded to. Even though I thought it was a rather poor essay in some respects the subject matter behind it had many provocative avenues to explore. And it is highly likely my long winded response will contain any more focus but I think we are all having fun here. Let us all raise a glass and 'toast' our good friend the Mr Mushroom Cloud. Like Dominos Pizza 30 minutes or less otherwise it is free (5 minutes if from a sub sitting off your coastline). Sure most nukes can be disarmed in mid flight, the big planet killer types anyway but that is largely irrelevant the time window being so small yielding a high probability of an 'extremely unsatisfactory misunderstanding' to develop.

And let us not remember the environmental triumph of the Hydrogen Bomb! Much more environmentally friendly than previous systems especially if delivery as an airburst (milage may vary depending on type of system and country of origin).

The recall of nuclear ordinance debate which seemed to be forming was interesting yet largely irrelevant. Modern strategic weapons systems (even rather vintage ones) can be disarmed 'en route' and have been during some 'oops my bad' broken arrow incidents. Yet these were not contained to proxy theaters of conflict; unlike having an MX-88 or Polaris system activate be it by Skynet, Uncle Ronnie or the GoogleBot (which will eventually kill us all) because once it is the air the opposing side has only minutes to make a call (as few as 6 minutes for a SLBM and maybe 30 for an ICBM) so disarmed or not a 'highly unsatisfactory' response may result anyway.

Many breathed a sigh of relief at the 'end' of the Cold War, now that Russia and NATO no longer 'actively target' one anthers cities and military assets. Now everything is all better since it will take an additional 90 seconds or so to retarget LOL. Now strategic forces of the various 'big boy nations' have just as much firepower but have 'gone slack'. The US has been bad enough with several public 'boo boos', Jeebus knows what the Russians or Chinese have managed to keep the lid on (the US and others too, not Israel though cause they don't have any nukes ;-)

Personally I miss the Cold War. It made listening to the Smiths more fun, I looked forward to possibly running 'Barter Town' some day and most of all nuclear war was taken seriously. It was a two player game back then and the greatest policy man never drafted aka MAD made sure things were locked up tight. At least back then all the nukes could be accounted for prior to being tucked in for bedtime after an exercise or being transported. Now, who knows?

Thanks for bringing attention to some of the more obscure apocalyptic films such as Special Bulletin (which I had never heard of). Such films comprise the majority of my DVD collection from Mad Max (speaking of such the special addition with the facts bar is a must own for any fan of that series), through the Terminator films and yeah even the Resident Evil series, so on and so on. Zombies, nukes, T-virus, Skynet, its all good in the Neutron Hood! Other goodies are:

'Colossus: The Forbidden Project' (pretty much the first Skynet of its time)
'Threads' (The UK's answer to the Day After but much more depressing and gritty)
'Children of Men' (which the way things are going in the world is grows more unsettling every-time I watch it, extremely well done film)

I stand by my criticism but but must say the subject matter chosen really got me thinking about the good old days. Our generation lived through some interesting times ... we even had toys analogous to the era like Lawn Darts (the real skull punching get the fuck out of the way kind) and other wonderfully dangerous playthings. Something a fellow Gen-X friend of mine coined 'Toys of Natural Selection'.

If I found myself board and a bit disappointed in the 'delivery and yield' of your essay I had great fun in basking in the after glow of the tall, orange and proud mushroom cloud left in its wake.

Excuse me I think I need to dust off my old turn table, turn the tube amp up to 11 and blast The Sex Pistols 'Holiday in the Sun' see if I can wake the neighbors.

Hope to see more writing from ya Michael - for me it was a trip down my own unfocused memory lane of what now seems like a much saner time than the present.

'Forgive or flame me for typos, I a fine lass I have been seeing interrupted me before I could proofread'

Regards

-Foxbat

foxbat

foxbat

Charlottesville, VA
June 2008

FEB 26, 2009 09:24 PM

See even in my last reference to typos I made a typo, LOL.

Then again when a fine lady calleth, I must ask myself WWBWD

'What Would Barry White Do?'

Well you know ;-)

-Foxbat

ardour

ardour

Canada
March 2006

FEB 26, 2009 10:13 PM

I've always liked the first Terminator movie a lot. I never really did get why the second one was so loved. I watched it once, and it was okay, but I thought it was nothing near as good as the first. Haven't seen any of the other movies made since.

That was an enjoyable read, by the way.

CheshireCat

CheshireCat

Los Angeles, CA
January 2004

FEB 26, 2009 11:17 PM

ardour said:
I've always liked the first Terminator movie a lot. I never really did get why the second one was so loved. I watched it once, and it was okay, but I thought it was nothing near as good as the first. Haven't seen any of the other movies made since.

That was an enjoyable read, by the way.



The second one has good moments, and the T-1000 ( Robert Patrick )was a good villain , but there was no point for the 3rd one. It felt half ass and Claire Danes annoyed me. The first one really captured my imagination , especially the apocalyptic future we view which much resembled " La Jette." I think its because so much was left to our imagination , we did not see everything , or if we did if was dark , and not slick. The t.v. show only has only turned the premise into another episodic soap. The future of the new movie IS NOT the dark future we saw in the original , not the one Conner's mother warned him about. What looks like a transforming Terminator , cute kids and robot motorcycles only confirms that. Let's hope they do not destroy it to much.

CheshireCat

CheshireCat

Los Angeles, CA
January 2004

FEB 26, 2009 11:58 PM

Michael_Marano said:
Hey, CC!
Just want to thank you for your shout out about Chris Marker's La Jette. It's a great movie, and worth mentioning. I didn't want to bring up that, and the other antecedents of The Terminator, like Harlan Ellison's Outer Limits scripts "Soldier", "Demon with the Glass Hand" and his story "I Have No Mouth, and I must Scream" and Fritz Leiber's "Change War" stories, as I thought it might just be a little too much info and make the essay lose its focus. So, yeah... track down these Terminator antecedents if you can, as they're all really freakin' good.



" I Have No Mouth and Want to Scream " sounds exactly like Terminator , as well as little show called "LOST" at times. I can see how this "Change War" and "La Jette" , as well "Demon" were weaved together to create "Terminator."

unfiltrator

unfiltrator

San Francisco, CA
April 2004

FEB 27, 2009 10:48 AM

It's been 25 years? Man these are strange times!

foxbat

foxbat

Charlottesville, VA
June 2008

FEB 27, 2009 09:28 PM

Ditto the T-1000 was a great villain. The second movie could have been much better if it kept to the bleakness of the first. A few changes and it could have been a very solid sequel on par with Cameron's Alines to Alien. Aliens was no Alien but a pretty good sequel to follow a masterpiece of Ridley Scott.

-Foxbat

CheshireCat

CheshireCat

Los Angeles, CA
January 2004

FEB 28, 2009 01:42 AM

foxbat said:
Ditto the T-1000 was a great villain. The second movie could have been much better if it kept to the bleakness of the first. A few changes and it could have been a very solid sequel on par with Cameron's Alines to Alien. Aliens was no Alien but a pretty good sequel to follow a masterpiece of Ridley Scott.

-Foxbat



any coincidence that both part 3s in those movies bit the big one. I love the cinematography in Alien 3 , but the story was a rehash. There was so much done in the comics not done in the movies.

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